We were tipped off by a local Irish couple late on the Saturday night of our weekend break.
We (the wife and I) were in a Dingle pub enjoying a fairly lusty sing-along of Irish ballads, most of which seemed to be anti-English to some degree or other, when the information came through, “You know that the clocks go forward tonight”.
Phew! The following morning (or should I say a few hours later) we were just in time for our traditional breakfast unlike the other guests in our boarding house. But since then our sense of timing has not been exactly perfect.
Normally I prowl around the house on the morning after the clocks change. Methodically I seek out every timepiece and make the necessary changes. Videos, oven-timers, computers, watches, clocks in the house, clocks in the car, all get the treatment. But being away from home this year I never got around to doing this in any sort of organised manner.
The effect of this omission took a while to manifest itself. While daffodils and tulips appeared on schedule, the cat came out of winter hibernation and ventured into the garden, the paths got swept and the grass got mown, something still was awry. It wasn’t just the volatility of the weather – raining one minute, sunshine the next – or the quick succession of seasonal events (Grand National, Boat Race, start of flat-racing and cricket, etc.), things kept going wrong - appointments were missed, TV programmes kept changing schedule, mealtimes were sometimes off track.
Matters came to a head when we set out for an Easter weekend in France, or should I say we failed to set out for an Easter weekend in France. We knew that we had to leave in good time because of holiday traffic and the unreliability of Eurotunnel at busy times. We arranged that the wife would meet me at my office no later than midday, but the appointed time came and there was no sign. I phoned at twenty past and discovered that she was still at home “about to leave”. Oddly she sounded calm and relaxed which was a little strange as the cat had to be delivered to her b&b before one o’clock and that was a full 35 minutes drive from the office.
When she finally arrived (at about ten minutes to one) looking calm and unruffled, we were eventually able to piece together the misunderstanding. I had been unaware that the wife relies wholly on our kitchen clock for time-keeping and that this particular timepiece had not been changed during the weeks since the clocks had moved forward. In a moment all sorts of oddities became clear to her – why she had been so late meeting the daughter a few days earlier, why horse races had a nasty habit of being over before a bet was placed, why TV schedules kept changing, why the sister-in-law had been kept waiting, etc., etc.
Come the autumn I’ll try to make sure that I’m home when the clocks go back again.
